Hidden Costs

The first of these was originally published in GPU Pro 2. Unfortunately, I missed some errors that crept into the typeset version, so I was pleased to finally correct those and I took the opportunity to rework a few sentences for greater clarity as well. Now that it’s online, I’ll also be able to refer directly to certain sections in follow-up blog posts on the subject.

The second took the form of a journal entry for the Microsoft Game Developer Network, which went up in the spring. It may have flown under your radar, as I’ve since spoken to a few developers who hadn’t seen it, yet were keen to have such a tool in their engine. For NDA reasons, I can’t go into all of the implementation details here, so think of it as a ‘graphical appetiser’.

In a way, the two topics are related: the primary goal of a visibility system is to efficiently remove parts of the world that can’t be seen from a given viewpoint, whereas the purpose of a debug overshading mode is to directly visualise pixel shader work, some of which can likewise have zero contribution to the final image.

I think it’s also fair to say that keeping both forms of redundancy in check is a critical part of optimising the rendering performance of most AAA titles. For that reason, I hope you find these articles useful, and as always, please let me know what you think!